What I’m thinking about: How does your country’s business really create value?
The answer to that question is the difference between successfully transforming your business with AI and not.
I’ve been digesting this article from Section (my favorite AI strategy newsletter), about the three AI strategy investments leaders should make in 2026.
But even before you think Regarding investments in AI, two fundamental questions need to be answered:
- How does our company really create value?
- What are we NOT going to invest more in to be able to finance the future?
Most traders jump straight to “Let’s throw AI at this problem” (raises hand) without first doing the careful work of understanding the mechanics of your business.
Let me explain how I think about this for our business as inspiration for you to think about yours.
Where land companies really create value
This was harder to answer than I expected.
When I was building our ACQ AI system (the AI built on Acquisition.com’s Claude, trained with proprietary data from small business strategist Alex Hormozi), I had to be very clear: Are we a service company or a physical product company?
You would think that real estate is obviously physical products. I mean, what’s more physical than the earth?
The reality for most companies in the country (including ours as an equity partner) is this: we are a service company.
The entire model is oriented around a single and repeatable strategy for the acquisition or country.
The layout side gets a lot of attention (especially in this brutal buyer’s market we’re navigating), and yes, it’s probably the most difficult part of the business right now, on average.
But that is NOT where you are creating (or capturing) value.
You can be aggressive with prices. You can use creative layout strategies that can be amplified with AI. You can work with the best real estate agents in your market.
But if your purchase price is wrong… none of that matters.
You make a profit on the purchase. Every time.
(Including subdivisions and value-added plays. If you misprice the cost of those tactics, your project falls apart. Again, all the value depends on the acquisition.)
So when you think about AI transformation, you should start here: What is the true value creation within your business model?
That’s your North Star. That’s where AI should make you more efficient, faster and more reliable.
The reassignment question that no one wants to answer
Next: What are you not going to invest more in to be able to finance the future?
This one hurts. We all want AI add capacity without taking anything away. We want to keep the entire 2025 plan intact, add some “AI initiatives” and plan for transformation.
This is not how it works. Nothing can change if nothing is cut.
Some painful cuts over the past year:
- Stop operating Land Pricer (it incurred a huge investment of time and money, but now my focus at Serious Land Capital is very clear and we can implement AI initiatives that have been sidelined for months).
- Significantly removed from Land Daily Diligence (we still appear when convenient for batch bid reviews, but it is not a routine priority as we focus on complex and luxury bids)
- He pointed out a handful of AI projects where we had high expectations after significant investment (see example below)
- Several SaaS products that were no longer keeping pace with our standards or use cases (check your overhead monthly with an executioner mentality).
No sacred cows. Well, except your reputation and not go to jail! Those are the only two ways to go bankrupt, according to the famous statistician and Skin in the game Author, Nassim Taleb. Everything else can be sacrificed or overcome.
My biggest dead end in AI (and what I learned)
There was a 2-3 week period in mid-2025 where I spent much of my best working hours developing a “Chief of Staff” AI project.
It was very in-depth and incorporated over 100 free response questions that interviewed me about my entire life and business.
As the project name indicates, the goal was to supercharge our daily operations, oriented around the decision making of my ideal self, key advice from masterminds and mentors, plus a wealth of internal business data.
It was enlightening…and practically useless.
It never fits into our workflow. The underlying data was difficult to use to derive real innovative insights.
Now, as noted, we have invested heavily in ACQ AI, which continues to improve every week. It forced us to calculate metrics that we should have known about YEARS ago but never bothered to track.
Now we know exactly what levers we need to solve our core limitation and move to the next level. It is based on data from business owners who are many steps ahead of us.
It’s better than our Chief of Staff project in every way, AND you can still incorporate the 100+ questions I answered.
Recover what you can from any failed projects or dead ends and move on.
What a $1M Subdivision Taught Me About AI vs. SaaS
Here’s a recent example that crystallized a lesson from the previous section’s article for me.
We were reviewing a minor subdivision deal outside of a major metropolitan area in the Northeast (one of the most macro bullish areas in the country from a real estate perspective, something I’ve been following for much of the last year).
As a non-exhaustive list, it requires a deep understanding of:
- Recent development trends
- Engineering requirements
- Local ordinances for subdivision (typically much stricter in the Northeast and Midwest)
- Variable comparable sales in an area where vacant land is rare
- Recent sales values of new construction homes
- Local income growth and demographic trends
This is not a standard comparable sales analysis by country. This is multivariate subscription that requires bringing together data sets that don’t normally communicate with each other.
And here’s what caught my attention: no SaaS product can handle ALL of this today (nor can any off-the-shelf LLM).
This is why many SaaS tools will be hit hard in the coming months and years (this has been playing out in the markets recently).
The future is not rigid (nor equally flexible) software with limited functions. The future is AI tools that adapt to his specific needs (like Seth and Mike’s Stride CRM), just like LLMs can be tailored precisely to each company’s unique workflows.
The Framework: Incremental AI vs. Transformative AI
The Section article divides AI opportunities into two categories:
- incremental: AI makes existing workflows faster and/or cheaper.
- Transformer: AI enables workflows that you literally couldn’t execute before.
Almost all companies have focused on incremental changes.
It’s much harder (and scarier) to ask, “What can we do that was literally impossible before?” (And with the acceleration of tools like Claude Cowork, what was “impossible” is decreasing day by day.)
For example, we are hurtling toward a world in which it will be possible to set alerts for any potential subdivision in the US, the moment they hit the market, with automated initial underwriting and offers sent on your behalf within minutes or hours.
That’s the new barrier: thinking beyond what even the most sophisticated team of humans could achieve before AI. Opportunities are only limited by your creativity and execution.
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Long term games
Our push into AI in 2026 is our number one investment.
That means accepting trade-offs:
- Team bandwidth reallocated to learning and deployment (expect some performance drops during retraining)
- Capital redirected from “safe” investments to AI infrastructure and experimentation
- Short-term inefficiency for long-term capability development (the trend across industries will be to build, rather than buy… as construction becomes simpler and cheaper).
If you can’t overcome that discomfort, your business will never reach its full potential.
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Your homework (if you want it)
Take 30 minutes this weekend and honestly answer these two questions:
- How does my business really create value? (It’s not what you or your team do day to day, but where the real mechanics of profit lie.)
- What am I going to stop investing in to be able to finance the AI transformation that my business needs?
Be specific. Share the answers with your team if you have one.
Then ask the follow-up:
What can I do with AI that was impossible before?
Not faster. Not cheaper. I couldn’t do at all.
That is your transformative opportunity. That’s where the maximum influence is.
2026 will separate the operators who understand this from those who don’t.
Let me know what you come up with. I’m all ears.
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Are you looking for a financial partner who invests for the long term rather than chasing quarterly profits? We have funded over $6 million in land deals with industry-leading 41% operating margins and closed 100% of the deals we commit to. Check sizes from $50 thousand to $1 million or more. Domestic underwriting experience on every transaction. Full-time ground operators preferred.
Analyze your property today
Originally published in https://seriousland.capital on December 22, 2025.
